A Step Ahead of the Competitors
Copenhagen City Council considers its own Corporate Service Center an external service provider. Consequently, the Corporate Service Center competes against other providers for delivering IT services to the council’s many employees. However, where other providers merely deliver declarations of intent, PerformanceGuard allows the Corporate Service Center to document its service levels based on facts. That is a very powerful competitive parameter.
The Corporate Service Center is the central point in the vast machinery that delivers council services to the citizens of the Danish capital. This is the story about how the Corporate Service Center keeps its IT services smoothly running while maintaining a constant focus on delivering the best possible user experience.
Since 2007, the Corporate Service Center has provided solutions in IT, finance, statistics, and human resources management to the municipality’s seven administrations.
Copenhagen is everything that it used to be: a pleasant place with a homely and intimate feel to it. Over time, however, the city has also turned into a busy and dynamic international metropolis with more than half a million citizens,
thousands of large and small businesses as well as many international organizations that all demand efficiency and high-quality services when dealing with the council.
“Very soon PerformanceGuard provided enough value for us to invest in it”
Corporate Service Center of Copenhagen
No Compromise on Quality
The Corporate Service Center was established in 2007 as a provider of managed services. One of the goals set by the councilors was that the Corporate Service Center should cut the cost of IT and administration by a minimum of 5% per year. Being able to meet this goal without compromising quality required a tool that was able to accurately measure how end users experienced IT service deliveries.
The council merged all of its IT departments, and built up a new structure that meant that the Corporate Service Center would be in direct competition with other providers when it came to delivering IT services. In effect, the Corporate Service Center is an external service provider, and consequently they need to be able to document the performance levels that they deliver.
How End-User Experience Is Measured in Local Government
The solution for the Corporate Service Center was to acquire PerformanceGuard from CapaSystems for performance monitoring, management reporting, and for documenting end users’ quality of experience. The
procedure is to collect information about response times from each of the council’s approximately 17,000 computers and then compare response times with events registered by the service desk or IT operations. In practice,
members of the technical team meet every fortnight to go through the state of affairs as seen from the end users’ perspective—based on the measurements delivered by PerformanceGuard.
The strong focus on end users’ quality of experience is highlighted by the fact that the Corporate Service Center competes on equal terms with other providers. There are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for everything from system response times and availability to computer startup times—everything that has an impact on end users’ ability to work efficiently.
Staying Ahead
Every month, the Corporate Service Center’s top managers receive a PerformanceGuard report of the status of each IT-related KPI. If there are any deviations, the monthly report also provides full descriptions of their causes.
It is the Corporate Service Center’s standard practice to ask the question “What does PerformanceGuard say?” whenever a problem occurs. If they are able to spot a trend in the information they get from PerformanceGuard before a problem occurs, they may also be able to prevent the problem from ever occurring again. The goal is to use data proactively by monitoring selected thresholds so that they get alerted before any problems arise.
Since the Corporate Service Center began using PerformanceGuard in February 2011, more and more options for documenting service deliveries have become available. For the Corporate Service Center, PerformanceGuard is the tool that will take its IT services one step ahead:
With PerformanceGuard fully implemented, it is a huge competitive parameter. As opposed to other providers, the Corporate Service Center is actually able to provide the customer, the council, with accurate figures and measurements of end users’ quality of experience rather than merely declarations of intent.
What This Gives the Corporate Service Center
- Be aware of end-user satisfaction
- Document IT performance
- Improve the quality of services
- Prove that the IT department delivers the expected service
- Be proactive
- Have a qualified basis for decision-making
PerformanceGuard Makes It Possible To:
- Analyze performance on the end user’s computer—CPU and memory usage, disk I/O, and boot and login times
- Measure response times between the computer and the applications used by the user
- Get an overview of the Citrix performance across the server farm
- Continuously collect Windows Performance Counters
- Make 24/7 monitoring of specific applications with automated user simulation
- Gather everything on dashboards in real time